Game developer Atlus, who make the popular Persona series have issued a DMCA take-down against the developers of popular PS3 emulator RPCS3.

From what Atlus put out publicly:

You might have heard earlier today that we issued a DMCA takedown notice involving emulation developer group RPCS3 and their Patreon page. Yes, it’s true.

They continued on, noting that they want their fans to get the best experience possible. It's a fair point, but this is likely the wrong way to go about it.

Essentially, Atlus are annoyed that people are emulating their games, like Persona 5. So they moved to contact Patreon directly to request they take down the Patreon pages of RPCS3 developers. This is without Atlus first getting in touch with those developers, which is a pretty blunt and nasty tactic in my opinion.

Thankfully, Patreon themselves have denied the request, given the fact that the Patreon page doesn't actually infringe on anyone's copyrights. As an act of caution, all mentions of Persona 5 from the official RPCS3 site and their Patreon pages have been removed.

The RPCS3 developers have said they don't "promote piracy nor do we allow it under any circumstances" and they've asked everyone to be nice about it.

They confirmed that they will continue to work on RPCS3, as I feel they should.

You can read what happened in the RPCS3 developers own words on reddit here. You can also see the official statement Atlus have put on their own site here.

QuoteThe PS3 emulator itself is not infringing on our copyrights and trademarks; however, no version of the P5 game should be playable on this platform; and [the RPCS3] developers are infringing on our IP by making such games playable

Does their IP covers the platform the game is being played? I don't think it covers that part.

It's hilarious that Sony has no issue with the emulator but some random developer has...

Next we will have some dev that issue a dmca against Wine cause the game works on wine, and wine runs on linux while their game is only for windows...

I can certainly understand them, piracy is a real problem and they want to do something about it, but that's not the way. Actually the whole war on piracy never fixed anything, it most probably made it worse, as long as they can't change the mindset of pirates the problem is never going to go away and this is not helping.

Pretty much agree with everyone here.
You can't stop piracy by blunt force. Torrents and cracks abound and any DRM gets broken eventually.
And several studies have shown that if people cant afford something they will pirate. And if they cannot even pirate they will not buy.

What they should focus on are grey markets. They harm devs a lot more , but only a few smaller devs woke up to this issue. The big games are still tied to dinosaur publishers and their stone age thinking.

While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on Patreon or Liberapay. We have no adverts, no paywalls, no timed exclusive articles. Just good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

We also accept Paypal donations and subscriptions! If you already are, thank you!